Quick Thought: the line is blurred… Challenge or opportunity?

04Feb09

The line is blurred. Your boss and best friends together on Facebook. Your rants heard by all on Twitter. Will the medium shape our digital social persona or will our need for channeled communication shape the medium?

Theory #1: We will learn to adopt a digial persona which can appeal to all contexts.

Our experience with digital conversations will create a third privacy dimension. Something between public and private. Between personal and professional. We will take a section of each and it will become who we are within the digital society. This new dimension will slowly but surely become the new notion of “public”. While private will be kept between the walls of direct messages, SMS, and email.

Theory #2: Social networks and microblogs, through increased usage, feel the need for classification, including subnetworks and groups which can accomodate our privacy needs.

In this scenario, we don’t change. Life is business as usual. Our boss does not know what we tell our friends unless we want to. Networks give us the ability, with many possible variations, to “channel up” our streams and create circles of interest around conversations. These can then be used for public and private needs, or simply for topical characterization.

Which will it be? As we speak, the first theory is unfolding. But the pressures of monetization under increasing traffic may very well force the need to segment via features such as classification.